Wanta .NET ?

Dave Wanta

So you've decided build a Newsletter, huh?

Building a Newsletter

Building some of the most popular .NET email components (aspNetEmail, aspNetMime, aspNetPOP3 ) has taught me a lot about email publishing. I thought I would share some tips with you about building a newsletter.

So you’ve got a site up and running, or you have an online business. Do you have a newsletter yet? If not, why not? Email is the life blood of the internet (will it soon be replaced by RSS?)  If you have a website, evidently you have content or a product that you want people to be interested in. And if they are interested in it, maybe they want to get notified when there is new information or a product upgrade available. I subscribe to at least 10 different newsletters, because I want to be proactively notified about new things.

In fact, newsletters can become a huge avenue of people staying up-to-date with your content. For example, my newsletters at www.123aspx.com or my www.kbAlertz.com daily newsletters. I probably do just as much traffic through my newsletters (if not more), than I do through the actual web pages.

TEXT or HTML?

So, you’ve decided to publish a newsletter, what should it be TEXT or HTML?  Well, I can tell you what people tell me they like, and then I can show you the stats. The die hard TEXT only guys seem to be pretty outspoken, they claim that’s the only type of newsletter they like to see. That’s fine, but according to my stats on www.123aspx.com and www.kbalertz.com I do about 10x more HTML newsletters than TEXT newsletters. So I’d have to recommend you have a HTML newsletter, minimum,  no questions asked. However, if at all possible, you need both. Why alienate 10% of your audience if you don’t have too?  The only difference in recording the type of subscription should be a bit field in the database.  Designing the letter may be a little more tricky, but again, its worth that 10%.  Especially if you’re like me, sending out over a 1/4 million newsletters a week (Yes, they are opt-in, not spam).

So what client do you design for?

Well, unlike the browser, there isn’t any way to tell what type of reader your client is using to read that newsletter, so you have to go based upon surveys. Let me just say that Outlook and Outlook express rule this market, with Yahoo Mail and Hotmail close on their heels. Designing a safe newsletter for either of these clients should keep you covered nicely. But how much does MS actually control the email client market? Well, here are the results from a study I revisit from time to time:

The study is a little old, but you can view it here. The numbers may change, but I believe the trend stays the same, at least for now.

 

Q. Which of the following email clients/accounts do you primarily use for work-related email?
Email/Client Adjusted Percentage
AOL 7.0 4.92
AOL 6.0 0.61
AOL 5.0 0.61
AOL 4.0 or lower 0
Microsoft Outlook 39.14
Microsoft Outlook Express 25.20
Eudora 4.30
Netscape 5.33
Hotmail 25.82
Yahoo! Mail 19.67
Lotus Notes 6.35
UNIX Command-Line Based 1.43
Juno 0.61
Other (write-in optional) 19.06


Q. Which of the following email clients/accounts do you primarily use for personal email?
Email/Client Adjusted Percentage
AOL 7.0 6.52
AOL 6.0 0.81
AOL 5.0 0.81
AOL 4.0 or lower .20
Microsoft Outlook 24.03
Microsoft Outlook Express 27.70
Eudora 3.67
Netscape 5.30
Hotmail 33.20
Yahoo! Mail 27.29
Lotus Notes 0.41
UNIX Command-Line Based 1.22
Juno 0.81
Other (write-in optional) 16.29

 

Are you capable of receiving HTML as well as text email formats?
Response Adjusted Percentage
Yes, I can receive both HTML and text. 89.18
No, I can not receive HTML-formatted email. 2.65
Don't know/not sure 8.16
Total 100.00

Questions? Comments? Got any gripes about a newsletter you subscribe to? Or would like to see done differently? What email client do you use?

Posted: Jul 07 2003, 03:43 PM by AdvanIntel | with 5 comment(s)

Comments

Dave Burke said:

As a long-time subscriber to your KBAlertz service, I appreciate you sharing your experience here in your blog. I also appreciated the statistics on HTML availability. I wondered about that for a while now.
# July 7, 2003 9:47 PM

Anthony Your said:

One forgotten statistic is PDA's. Even though I use Outlook, I might read it on my PPC which downlevels the email to plain text.
# July 7, 2003 11:52 PM

Alex Hoffman said:

Interesting - can you provide any details on the infrastructure and tools you use to actually send the emails?
# July 8, 2003 5:32 AM

Scott Mitchell said:

Alex, the tools Dave uses, I assume, is his own aspnetEmail product, see: http://aspnetemail.com/

This product is a cinch to used, I used it before in a short-term consulting project, and had everything figured out and going within a couple of hours. (Actually getting Dave's component installed and working, and learning the syntax took under an hour. The online docs and examples are superb.)
# July 8, 2003 7:34 PM

Dave said:

Yes, I use all of my tools, dogfood style. All the emails themselves are built using aspNetEmail. Along with some aspNetPOP3 and aspNetMime usage.

Generating the emails usually only takes a matter of seconds (<10,000 or so) to longer than a minute (30, 40, 50K+)

As far as the service, I use a couple of different kinds, depending upon what I'm testing. I either use IMAIL, the IIS SMTP Service, or a custom one I've written and have been testing for about 2 months. I've just about got all the bugs worked out, and its pretty spiffy service. Just a little over 4x faster than the IIS SMTP Svc.

I'll soon be releasing my service as a product.
# July 8, 2003 8:01 PM
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